Page 27 of Spectacular Things
Momfession
“What did your teammates do?” Cricket asks, but Liz shakes her head to dismiss the question.
There are many places to begin, but her teammates’ reaction—their collective excommunication—isn’t where Liz wants to start, and this is her story.
She brings her hands together because what is a prayer if not a concentrated plea for help.
Beyond the plane’s window, the dark horizon stretches across the Atlantic and into the unknown.
“Did you think about an abortion?” Mia interrupts.
It’s a question she’s had since seventh-grade health class, when the teacher referred to abortions in a lesson called “Family Planning.” Mia has always wondered where she’d be if her mom had gone that route—would she be with another family right now? Would she be at all?
Liz nods. “I did. Of course I did—I had signed with UCLA, and Q was—it was complicated. And my parents told me I’d be on my own with a baby.”
“So you gave up everything to have Mia,” Cricket says, cobbling together the facts.
“I loved Q so much,” Liz deflects, “and I knew I was going to love Mia even more than I loved him, because she would be the best of both of us.”
“But how’d you fall in love with your soccer coach?” Cricket asks, her lips curled back in fear. It seems to her that love must be some kind of airborne disease you could catch just about anywhere, from anyone, and she does not want to fall in love with any of her coaches, ever.
“Well, he was a very good coach,” Liz jokes, hailing the flight attendant for another glass of wine.
“He should be in jail,” Mia growls. “He ruined your life.”
“Oh, Mia,” Liz whispers under her breath. “I was in love with him. It was consensual.”
“But you were underage,” Mia points out. “And you weren’t the only one.” Mia thinks of those pages on the internet, all those women coming forward, confronting society’s scrutiny by telling the truth.
“I learned about the others much later on,” Liz confesses.
“At the time, I believed we were soulmates.” She sighs, resigned to her own ignorance.
“That, of course, proved to be wrong.” The flight attendant hands her a tiny screw-top bottle and Liz refills her own cup.
“He was sick, in more ways than one, not that it excuses his behavior.”
“Sick how?” Cricket asks.
Liz refolds her legs and turns to Mia. “Remember the summer he came to visit?”
Mia nods.
“So he shows up, tells me he’s told his wife about me, and that he wants to move up here, and start all over. With me.”
“And you said yes.”
“I said, ‘Let’s try it,’?” Liz says with assertiveness. “We talked it over that first day, after he showed up on the porch, and it seemed promising, and we were so happy that summer.” She tilts her head and pierces Mia with those ice-blue eyes. “You were so happy that summer . ”
Mia can see him now, Q driving her home from the fancy plant store in Kennebunkport, the shared Mexican Coke between them. The knowing she’d felt at the time. The understanding that he was the piece they’d been missing, but he’d found them. They could finally be a family.
“And then he left,” Mia says, a detached coldness in her voice. “I guess he was excited to get back for preseason and start grooming the next star player.”
“No, I kicked him out,” Liz says, reaching up to open the air vent above her seat.
“No, he left,” Mia argues. “And you spent weeks crying in bed.”
“After I kicked him out,” Liz insists.
“So why’d you kick him out?” Cricket asks, cutting through the tension.
“Because he was an alcoholic and I had no idea,” Liz says, unfazed, delivering a blow Mia did not see coming. “It turns out he was drunk the whole summer, and even driving Mia around totally wasted while I was at work.”
Mia’s breath snags as she remembers all the silly road swerves. The loud bragging to strangers. Falling asleep in the middle of the day. Lumbering up the Skee-Ball lane.
“That last night he was here, we’d had a damn near perfect day,” Liz continues. “We tucked Mia into bed and went downstairs, and I had this great idea to play a board game.”
“But you hate board games,” Cricket says.
“Now I do,” Liz corrects her. “So I go to the basement and start looking around for them and I find them tucked away in the back of that narrow closet, next to the washer and dryer, and when I reach up to grab the stack, something falls, and it’s an empty beer can.”
“Uh-oh,” Cricket says, captivated, and Mia looks at her sister with contempt. This is not just some scary story told in the dark at a sleepover; this is their family history.
“So then I decide to explore what’s on top of all the board games, in a big sparkly gift bag I’d saved from Mia’s fourth birthday, and it’s filled with crushed beer cans.”
“Silver,” Mia says, suddenly remembering. “They were in his glove compartment and in the center console. He called them his hockey pucks.”
“That’s right,” Liz says, sighing loudly.
“His fucking hockey pucks.” She surprises both daughters by wiping at her eyes, but the tears fall too fast to catch them.
She hadn’t even seemed upset until right then.
“It was one thing that he was secretly drinking, that he was sick and had lied to me every which way, but then I realized that all those drives with you—I could have—you could have—” She shakes her head to finish the sentence, and then takes several long pulls from her water bottle.
Mia watches her closely, sees her mother thinking of a different world in which they weren’t together right now.
“Here’s what I need you both to know,” Liz says, clearing her throat.
“When you’re young—and I know I sound old starting out with that—but when you’re young, it’s impossible to understand the permanence of your decisions or their ripple effects.
Because at the time, I truly thought I could do anything, and I thought your father was a good man, and I was very, very wrong. ”
“Neither of us is ever going to sleep with a coach,” Mia says.
“Or an assistant coach,” Cricket adds helpfully.
“Or a professor,” Mia says. “Or anyone in a position of power over us.”
“And that makes me happier than you could ever know,” Liz says, covering Mia’s fist with her hand. “But someday it might be trickier to avoid than it seems right now.”
Mia scoffs as she looks at Cricket for camaraderie, but Cricket has turned her attention back to the view outside her window. Mia recognizes her sister’s visualization face. Cricket isn’t dwelling on their mother’s poor choices, or Mia’s fury, but on her own future.
Picking at a scab on her knee, Cricket swears to herself that wherever her father is, he will hear her name someday and learn that she has become a world-class soccer player. She will avenge her father’s wrongdoing with her own stellar career.
Liz drinks the rest of her wine, exhausted but determined to push her point home. “Even though I didn’t make great decisions—when I was younger than you are now, Mia, I think it’s fair to point out—I’m grateful that I ended up in this life, with you two.”
Once again, the flight attendant appears, rustling a fresh trash bag in the aisle.
Liz reaches over Mia to dispose of her plastic wine cup.
“He was a bad guy, and it was a terrible time, but without him, I wouldn’t have you,” she says, lifting Mia’s chin and making her elder daughter look at her. “And I’m so proud to be your mom.”
“What about me?” Cricket asks, abruptly leaning in from her window seat. “Aren’t you proud of me?” She smiles sheepishly at Mia, as if waiting for her sister’s response as much as their mom’s.
Liz laughs and Mia, as always, softens at Cricket’s raw desire to please her—the warm sensation of being worthy of impressing, especially by someone whose own talent has been deemed so impressive so publicly; her little sister’s budding soccer career has been featured in The Boston Globe twice and in the Portland Press Herald too many times to count.
Maybe it’s the altitude, but Mia feels her head lighten and her shoulders relax. It’s like she’s been clenching her teeth since that night in the archival library, pushing down on what needed to breathe free. No more dirty secrets. She and her mother are back on the same team.
Her father—a terrible, albeit sick, man—can be laid to rest. It’s Mia’s choice how to handle him from now on, and she decides to banish him from her mind. He’s irrelevant. His chapter is closed. From now on, this is the epic adventure of the three Lowe women.